Congratulations to the five MLA members among those awarded 2021 American Council of Learned Societies fellowships, which support outstanding scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. The projects recognized include a book about free verse as a racialized construction that created barriers for Black and Indigenous poets and critics and another about renowned authors who were also transformative teachers and educational activists and whose experiences in public universities fundamentally altered the course of American literature.
Fellowships
Georgia Henley, Saint Anselm College
Project title: Memory on the Margins: Reimagining the Past in the Medieval Anglo-Welsh Borderlands
Erin Kappeler, Tulane University
Project title: The Songs of White Folk: Anti-Blackness, Settler Colonialism, and the Invention of Free Verse
Jay David Miller, University of Notre Dame
Project title: Quaker Jeremiad
Danica Savonick, State University of New York, Cortland
Project title: Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Open Admissions
Erin A. Spampinato, Colby College
Project title: Awful Nearness: A Literary and Cultural History of Rape, 1740–1900